I write to you from a height of stupid-thousand feet, en route to Marrakech. I’ve never really had the urge to visit Africa. Not even repeated listening to Toto’s magnum opus, “Africa”, has ever seduced me into making a special trip to hear the drums echoing tonight, while growing restless, longing for some solitary company, before seeing Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti. Over the next four days, however, I hope to unravel for you the mysteries of a dark continent, or at the very least describe an amusing incident involving me, a Berber tent, a tagine and a leaky biro.

I hate flying, but Royal Air Maroc did their best to make things as comfortable as possible for me by providing a soundtrack of light jazz and bossa nova classics during take-off. It’s a strange experience to have the correct handling of an oxygen mask demonstrated to you while an emotionless version of The Girl From Ipanema plays over the speakers. “Dark and tanned, and young and lovely, the cabin crew will now demonstrate the safety facilities on board this aircraft, ah, but he watches so sadly,” and so on.

In order to stimulate my appetite for North African life, I brought with me the Kenneth Williams Diaries, which I’ve just dipped into as we skim the tops of the Pyrenees. Annoyingly, the index informs me that he always went to Tangier rather than Marrakech, so that’s a) the sign of a failing memory on my part, and b) a waste of luggage space. As a guidebook it tends to concentrate on salacious encounters with boys called Absolom followed by urgent trips to the chemist, so I’m probably better off with the Time Out guidebook in any case.

Sometimes I wish I had a proper job, so I could be fired for blogging and get a book deal.

Yesterday afternoon was spent at the height of zero feet in a garden in Limehouse, at a friend’s barbecue. As Jenny was eating, a pink post-it noted fluttered down on the breeze and landed on her plate. I took the liberty of scanning it:

If anyone already knows Leanne’s secret and is about to embark on either 19, 21 or 23, I guess you should probably write it on a post it note and chuck it out of the window at a middle-class barbecue in the East End. Just a suggestion. Ah, coming into land. Thank God for that. Allah. Whoever.

EDIT: Man alive, it’s 44ºC.